The clouds had made a crimson crown Above the mountains high. The stormy sun was going down In a stormy sky. Why did you let your eyes so rest on me, And hold your breath between? In all the ages this can never be As if it had not been. ~Mary Elizabeth Coleridge “A Moment”
Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads, Great, hollow, bell-like flowers, Rumbling in the wind, Stretching clappers to strike our ears . . .
Full-lipped flowers Bitten by the sun Bleeding rain Dripping rain like golden honey— And the sweet earth flying from the thunder. ~Jean Toomer “Storm Ending”
A thunderstorm swirled above us last night as we finished our farm chores, dropping noisy raindrops and then passing until the next cloud rolled over and dumped some more. I climbed to the top of our hill and looked out at a busted-up sky trying to mend itself. It was trying to zip itself together again but once fractured, it was broken forever, pouring gold rays of sunbeams like honey onto the landscape.
In that moment of broken sky, I was doused in a Light that breathed golden breath on me, reminding me not to forget: He is here.
God does not leave us comfortless in the storms of our lives so be not afraid. He is still here in the morning.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come. ~Jane Kenyon “Let Evening Come”
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Light and wind are running over the headed grass as though the hill had melted and now flowed. ~Wendell Berry “June Wind” from New Collected Poems
The rain to the wind said, ‘You push and I’ll pelt.’ They so smote the garden bed That the flowers actually knelt, And lay lodged–though not dead. I know how the flowers felt. ~Robert Frost “Lodged”
All that I serve will die, all my delights, the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field, the silent lilies standing in the woods, the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all will burn in man’s evil, or dwindle in its own age. Let the world bring on me the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know my little light taken from me into the seed of the beginning and the end, so I may bow to mystery, and take my stand on the earth like a tree in a field, passing without haste or regret toward what will be, my life a patient willing descent into the grass. ~Wendell Berry “The Wish to be Generous” from Collected Poems
The abundant grasses in the surrounding hay fields were hit hard with heavy rainfall and wind yesterday, collapsing under the weight of the pelting moisture. Countless four foot tall tender stems are now lodged and flattened in undulating bent-over waves of green, embracing the earth from which they arose. If the rain continues as predicted over the next several days, the grass may not recover, unable to dry out enough to stand upright again, nor are the fields dry enough to bring tractors and equipment to the rescue.
It is ironic to lose a crop from too much of a good thing– lush growth demands, but often cannot withstand, quenching rains. It has matured too fast, rising up too lush, too overcome with itself so that it can no longer stand. The grass keels over in community, broken and crumpled, likely now unsuitable for cutting or baling into hay, and unless chopped quickly into silage to ferment for winter cattle feed, it must melt back into the soil again.
However–if there are dry spells amid the showers over the next few days, with a breeze to lift the soaked heads and squeeze out the wet sponge created by layered forage–the lodged crop may survive and rise back up. It may be raised and lifted again, pushing up to meet the sun, its stems strengthening and straightening.
What once was so heavy laden and down-trodden might lighten; what was silent could once again move and sing and wave with the wind.
The hill pasture, an open place among the trees, tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill dark floodwater moves down the river. The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing. I have climbed up to water the horses and now sit and rest, high on the hillside, letting the day gather and pass. Below me cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands, slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world men are making plans, wearing themselves out, spending their lives, in order to kill each other. ~Wendell Berry “In This World” from Farming: A Handbook
What stood will stand, though all be fallen, The good return that time has stolen. Though creatures groan in misery, Their flesh prefigures liberty To end travail and bring to birth Their new perfection in new earth. At word of that enlivening Let the trees of the woods all sing And every field rejoice, let praise Rise up out of the ground like grass. What stood, whole in every piecemeal Thing that stood, will stand though all Fall–field and woods and all in them Rejoin the primal Sabbath’s hymn. ~Wendell Berry, from “Sabbaths” (North Point Press, 1987).
From The Nicene Creed
Et expecto resurrectionem motuorum. Et vitam venturi saeculi. Amen. Alleluia.
And I look for the resurrection of the dead, And the life of the world to come. Amen. Alleluia
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…mourning and great weeping, weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more. from Matthew 2:18 and Jeremiah 31:15
Newtown, CT December 2012 There are the fields we’ll walk across In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, There are the fields we’ll walk across.
There are the houses we’ll walk toward In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, There are the houses we’ll walk toward.
There are the faces we once kissed In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, There are the faces we once kissed.
Incredible how we laughed and cried In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, Incredible how we laughed and cried.
Incredible how we’ll meet again In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, Incredible how we’ll meet again.
No small hand will go unheld In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, No small hand will go unheld.
No voice once heard is ever lost In the snow lightly falling. In the snow lightly falling, No voice once heard is ever lost. ~Dick Allen “Solace”
In mourning for the families of Uvalde, Texas
There is no comfort for these families. Their arms ache with emptiness, their childrens’ beds and pillows cold tonight, dolls and stuffed animals awaiting all night hugs that will never come again.
There is no earthly consolation; only mourning and great weeping, sobbing that wrings dry every human cell, leaving only dust behind, which is our beginning and our end.
Christ came to us for times such as this, born of the dust of woman and the breath of Spirit. God bent down to be cradled in barn dust, walk on roads of dust, die and be laid to rest as dust to conquer such evil as this – the slaughter and massacre of innocents.
He became dust to be like us He began a mere speck in a womb like us His heart beat like ours breathing each breath like ours until a fearful fallen world took His and our breath away.
He shines His Light through the darkness of tragic deaths to guide our stumbling uncertain feet. His tender mercies flow freely when there is no consolation, when there is no comfort.
He hears our cries as He cried too. He knows our tears as He wept too. He knows our mourning as He mourned too. He knows our dying as He died too.
God wept as this happened yesterday. Evil comes not from God yet humankind embraces it. Sin is our ongoing choice, a decision made from our beginning, but we can choose to end it now.
Only God can glue together what evil has shattered. He asks us to hand Him the pieces of our broken hearts, abandon our evil ways and sin no more.
We will know His peace when He comes to bring us home, our tears finally dried, our cells no longer just dust, as we are glued together by the word and breath and voice of God forevermore.
the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace. Luke 1: 78-79
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us, and God. ~Stephen Paulus “The Old Church”
A little aside from the main road, becalmed in a last-century greyness, there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal to the tourist to stop his car and visit it. The traffic goes by, and the river goes by, and quick shadows of clouds, too, and the chapel settles a little deeper into the grass.
But here once on an evening like this, in the darkness that was about his hearers, a preacher caught fire and burned steadily before them with a strange light, so that they saw the splendour of the barren mountains about them and sang their amens fiercely, narrow but saved in a way that men are not now. ~R.S. Thomas “The Chapel”
It’s just a boarded-up shack with a tower Under the blazing summer sky On a back road seldom traveled Where the shadows of tall trees Graze peacefully like a row of gallows…
The congregation may still be at prayer. Farm folk from flyspecked photos Standing in rows with their heads bowed As if listening to your approaching steps. So slow they are, you must be asking yourself How come we are here one minute And in the very next gone forever? Try the locked door, then knock once.
High above you, there is the leaning spire Still feeling the blow of the last storm. And then the silence of the afternoon . . . Even the unbeliever must feel its force. ~Charles Simic, from “Wooden Church” from The Voice at 3:00 A.M.
The church knelt heavy above us as we attended Sunday School, circled by age group and hunkered on little wood folding chairs where we gave our nickels, said our verses, heard the stories, sang the solid, swinging songs.
It could have been God above in the pews, His restless love sifting with dust from the joists. We little seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting to grow toward the light.
Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside, an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp- edged shadows back to their buildings, or how the winter air knifed after the dreamy basement.
Maybe the day we learned whatever would have kept me believing I was just watching light poke from the high, small window and tilt to the floor where I could make it a gold strap on my shoe, wrap my ankle, embrace any part of me. ~Maureen Ash “Church Basement”
Mom, You raised your hands while we sang this morning like I’ve never known you to, but I guess until recently I’ve never really known you in a church that let you feel alive.
There is so much wrong with churches overall, comprised as they are of fallen people with broken wings and fractured faith, we who look odd and lean awry, so keen to find flaws in one another when we are cracked open and spilling with our own.
Yet what is right with the church is who we pray to, why we sing and absorb the Word- we are visible people joined together as a body so bloodied, bruised, being healed despite our thoroughly motley messiness.
Our Lord of Heaven and Earth rains down His restless love upon our heads no matter how humble a building we worship in, or how we look or feel today.
We are simply grateful to be alive, to raise our hands, to kneel and bow in a house God calls His own.
The old church leans nearby a well-worn road, Upon a hill that has no grass or tree, The winds from off the prairie now unload The dust they bring around it fitfully.
The path that leads up to the open door Is worn and grayed by many toiling feet Of us who listen to the Bible lore And once again the old-time hymns repeat.
And ev’ry Sabbath morning we are still Returning to the altar waiting there. A hush, a prayer, a pause, and voices fill The Master’s House with a triumphant air.
The old church leans awry and looks quite odd, But it is beautiful to us and God. ~Stephen Paulus
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Day and night A fragrance of hope Day and night She pleads for the lost and broken Day and night Until He comes ~Keith and Kristyn Getty
There was also a prophet, Anna, the daughter of Penuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was very old; she had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, and then was a widow until she was eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying.Coming up to them at that very moment, she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem. Luke 2: 36-38
What’s enough? Countless times I’ve watched the sun rise like God’s tender mercy to gently lift the dark blanket from the earth, and countless more times I’ve watched the sun set in such a splendiferous farewell that it must reflect the fringe on God’s robe. I’ve seen the sky define blue and endless. I’ve watched rivers run to the sea, full as life runs to God. I’ve felt the sea roll in on the eternal note of mystery and assurance.
I’ve scratched the ears of dogs, laughed at the ballet of cats. I’ve heard the cry and gurgle of the newborn, played with children, rocked with grandmothers, learned from hundreds of teachers, some of them homeless, poor, and uneducated.
I’ve been loved and forgiven beyond all deserving, and all breath to tell of it, by family and friends and God.
I’ve been shaken, changed, and blessed a thousand times — and still — by the prophets, and by Christ. I’ve felt the touch of God, each time before I realized that’s what it was. I’ve shared in the cantankerous yet remarkable family of faith called the church. I’m conscious of being conscious and alive. And all that’s just for starters.
How much does it take to praise God? I have a couple of trips around the Milky Way past enough for that, no matter if I never receive another thing.
So I best get on with it . . . and praise God that I can. — Ted Loder from The Haunt of Grace
Unlike Anna the prophet, I tend to forget, in my ever-inward focus, I was created for worship and to give all glory to God. I was given a mouth to sing, hands to clasp, eyes to witness His wonders, profound forgiveness through day and night, night and day.
Unlike Anna who waited so long, I’m not sure I would recognize the touch of God.
May I – praying alongside others who are also flawed and broken – be a fragrance of hope, praising God that we are able to praise Him.
What greater reason is there to exist?
This year’s Lenten theme for Barnstorming is a daily selection from songs and hymns about Christ’s profound sacrifice on our behalf.
If we remain silent about Him, the stones themselves will shout out and start to sing (Luke 19:40).
In His name, may we sing…
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Praise to the Lord of the small broken things, who sees the poor sparrow that cannot take wing. who loves the lame child and the wretch in the street who comforts their sorrows and washes their feet. ~Johanna Andersonfrom Lord of the Small
God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. ~Vance Havner
We yearn for perfection, to be flawless and faultless, unblemished, aiming for symmetry, straight and smooth.
Life serves up something far different.
In the beginning, we were created unblemished, image bearers of perfection. No longer. Now we bear witness to brokenness with shattered lives, fragile minds and frail bodies. It is our vulnerability and need for healing that stand out now.
To restore our lost relationship with Him, God applies the glue of grace to seal our cracks and heal our bustedness.
He breaks Himself to mend us, to glue us firmly in place, bound to Him forever.
This year’s Lenten theme for Barnstorming is a daily selection from songs and hymns about Christ’s profound sacrifice on our behalf.
If we remain silent about Him, the stones themselves will shout out and start to sing (Luke 19:40).
In His name, may we sing…
Praise to the Lord of the small broken things, who sees the poor sparrow that cannot take wing. who loves the lame child and the wretch in the street who comforts their sorrows and washes their feet.
Praise to the Lord of the faint and afraid who girds them with courage and lends them His aid, He pours out his spirit on vessels so weak, that the timid can serve and the silent can speak.
Praise to the Lord of the frail and the ill who heals their afflictions or carries them till, they leave this tired frame and to paradise fly. to never be sick and never to die.
Praise him, O praise Him all ye who live who’ve been given so much and can so little give our frail lisping praise God will never despise- He sees His dear children through mercy-filled eyes.
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So slim and flexible I could have rung my fingers round that skinny trunk. Oh, you are built to survive a vernal storm. Listen to me, though—
endure the wind’s force without resistance. Lean with the fury.
When you’re nearly bowed over think broad trunk think sturdy bark. Someday you won’t bend nearly so—
and to that scared little girl the one I saw yesterday in the department store
hiding under the dress rack enduring a mother’s torrent—
I’m sorry. You won’t bend nearly so after you’re grown. ~Christine Bodine, “late apology to the scared little girl in the department store” from Souvenirs of Myself
I know a psychiatrist colleague, soon to be 80 years old and still seeing patients, who recommends people should aim to be more like a willow than a chestnut tree. His long clinical practice has given him a perspective of who survives and who becomes irretrievably broken when the forces of life hit hard.
I know I am not one to freely yield to the wind or ice storm. More chestnut than willow or birch, I can tend toward inflexibility rather than suppleness.
This means I easily break when anger and fury abound in the world around me, rather than leaning and bending. What’s left is broken pieces awaiting salvage, feeding the flames of the brush pile with all the rest of the rigid and unyielding.
Yea, if I don’t bow like a willow, I fall broken upon the rock.
photo by Harry Rodenberger
I will bow and be simple, I will bow and be free, I will bow and be humble, Yea, bow like the willow tree.
I will bow, this is the token, I will wear the easy yoke, I will bow and will be broken, Yea, I’ll fall upon the rock. Shaker melody
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slicing this frozen sky know where they are going— and want to get there.
Their call, both strange and familiar, calls to the strange and familiar
heart, and the landscape becomes the landscape of being, which becomes
the bright silos and snowy fields over which the nuanced and muscular geese
are calling—while time and the heart take measure. ~Jane Mead, “The Geese” from To the Wren
Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats awakens me and I look up at a minute-long string of black geese’ following low past the moon the white course of the snow-covered river and by the way thank You for keeping Your face hidden, I can hardly bear the beauty of this world ~Franz Wright from “Cloudless Snowfall”
A psalm of geese labours overland
cajoling each other near half…
The din grew immense. No need to look up.
All you had to do was sit in the sound
and put it down as best you could…
It’s not a lonesome sound but a panic,
a calling out to the others to see if they’re there;
it’s not the lung-full thrust of the prong of arrival in late October; not the slow togetherness
of the shape they take on the empty land on the days before Christmas:
this is different, this is a broken family, the young go the wrong way,
then at daybreak, rise up and follow their elders again filled with dread, at the returning sound of the journey ahead. ~Dermot Healy from A Fool’s Errand
We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times.
Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house. ~Annie Dillard from The Meaning of Life
As I am at once strange and familiar, I call out to God to see if He’s there; He knows me as He came to earth both strange and familiar.
His face is no longer hidden yet I hide my face from Him.
When I call out to Him I try to conceal the tremble of my hands, my eyes welling up, breathing out the deep sigh of doubt — He witnesses my struggle, offering me the gift of being noticed and heard.
There is beauty in this world and in His face, and through it all, my eyes are on you.
It is well.
A book of beauty in words and photographs – available to order here:
Here is a story to break your heart. Are you willing? This winter the loons came to our harbor and died, one by one, of nothing we could see. A friend told me of one on the shore that lifted its head and opened the elegant beak and cried out in the long, sweet savoring of its life which, if you have heard it, you know is a sacred thing., and for which, if you have not heard it, you had better hurry to where they still sing. And, believe me, tell no one just where that is. The next morning this loon, speckled and iridescent and with a plan to fly home to some hidden lake, was dead on the shore. I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world. ~Mary Oliver “Lead” from New and Selected Poems
Why shouldn’t we go through heartbreaks?
…if through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart. ~Oswald Chambers from “Ye are not your own” from My Utmost for the Highest
These last two years have seen an epidemic of heart-break.
Due to hospital visitor restrictions, thousands of loved ones have died of COVID without family by their side, deprived of the solace of hearing familiar voices and being touched by familiar hands. A weary and over-worked health care team can only do so much in their efforts to comfort and console when so many patients are losing their battle with the virus at the same time. Although nurses and doctors have always been witnesses to the cries of the dying and the weeping of the grief-stricken, that is usually together at the bedside.
An iPad screen isn’t the same for those saying good-bye forever.
For all the advances of our modern society – through technology and communication and the development of medical miracles – people still die and others still grieve and weep over their loss. We’re not used to dying happening with such frequency to those who have no business dying in the first place. We assume death rates exceeding birth rates happens only in third world countries beset with drought or plague.
Not any more.
So my heart is tender – for those lost, for those left behind, for those trying their best to save lives when they are weary and ill themselves, for the irony of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths when the preventive measures available to us all are so clear-cut.
If anything, a breaking heart is an open invitation for the solace of a God who himself had no business dying in the first place, but did. He cried out in a long, sweet savoring of his life and ours, saving us in the process.
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Hanging old ornaments on a fresh cut tree, I take each red glass bulb and tinfoil seraph And blow away the dust. Anyone else Would throw them out. They are so scratched and shabby.
My mother had so little joy to share She kept it in a box to hide away. But on the darkest winter nights—voilà— She opened it resplendently to shine.
How carefully she hung each thread of tinsel, Or touched each dime-store bauble with delight. Blessed by the frankincense of fragrant fir, Nothing was too little to be loved.
Why do the dead insist on bringing gifts We can’t reciprocate? We wrap her hopes Around the tree crowned with a fragile star. No holiday is holy without ghosts. ~Dana Gioia, “Tinsel, Frankincense, and Fir”
Whenthe song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart. ~Howard Thurman from The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations
There are plenty of ghosts hiding in the boxes of ornaments I place on our Christmas tree.
Closing my eyes, I can see my father struggling to straighten our wild cut trees from our woods, mumbling under his breath in his frustration as he lies prone under the branches. I can see my mother, tears in her eyes, arranging ornaments from her parents’ childhoods, remembering times in her childhood that were fraught and fragile.
Each memory, every scratched-up glass ball is so easily breakable, a mere symbol for the fragility of us all this time of year.
Our real work of Christmas isn’t just during these frantic weeks of Advent but lasts year-long — often very hard intensive work, not just fa-la-la-la-la and jingle bells, but badly needed labor in this broken world with its homelessness, hunger, disease, conflict, addictions, depression and pain.
Even so, we enter winter next week replete with a startling splash of orange red that paints the skies in the evenings, the stark and gorgeous snow covered peaks surrounding us during the day, the grace of bald eagles and trumpeter swans flying overhead, the heavenly lights that twinkle every night, the shining globe that circles full above us, and the loving support of the Hand that rocks us to sleep when we are wailing loud.
Once again, I prepare myself to do the real work of Christmas, acknowledging the stark reality that the labor that happened in a barn that night was only the beginning of the labor required to salvage this world begun by an infant in a manger.
We don’t need a fragrant fir, full stockings on the hearth, Christmas villages on the side table, or a star on the top of the tree to know the comfort of His care and the astounding beauty of His creation, available for us without batteries, electrical plug ins, or the need of a ladder.
The ghosts and memories of Christmas tend to pull me up from my doldrums, alive to the possibility that even I, broken and fragile, scratched and showing my age, can make a difference, in His name, all year.
Nothing is too little to be loved…even me.
This year’s Barnstorming Advent theme “… the Beginning shall remind us of the End” is taken from the final lines in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”
